The Swiss company's internal customer support team consisted of one person. The number of requests was extremely high and the specialist did not have enough time to process all of them. Requests within the service desks accounted for around 60% of all user requests. IT service was not properly organised. Requests could be received by phone/email/personal contact. Therefore, it was impossible to prioritise them. Even if a request had a low priority and it was necessary to attend to it in person, it had to be done at once, as all requests were processed in chronological order. This slowed down major tasks and stopped users' workflows. It was impossible to assess the effectiveness of the service provided and to improve it.
In addition, there were other tasks for the internal customer support team that they didn't have time on. Among them was a major project to open stores in the regions of Russia.
In order to improve customer service efficiency, the client decided to provide the first line of support and outsource it.
Apart from that, the company needed assistance in migrating virtual machines to a new local server, as the previous infrastructure was outdated.
Key Challenges
- Providing first-line support and on-site technical support to optimize IT processes.
ICL Services has provided its first-line support. This reduced the time for processing requests and solving user problems. Service has become better, requests are now classified by priority, critical tasks are solved first.
The first line of support is based on the OTRS ITSM system.
Thanks to the open system of processing requests, managers are able to quickly respond to customers' needs. If necessary, the request is switched to a free or more qualified employee.
The IT service is up and running. It can be evaluated, monitored, and data can be collected and processed to improve it.
In order to ensure smooth operation regardless of staff turnover, a knowledge base was created describing all processes ICL Services is engaged in and the tasks performers may encounter. The knowledge base is designed for ICL Services employees and is regularly updated.
The ICL Services team arranged for field engineers to maintain the equipment. For the client, it is a cost-effective solution with high efficiency.
Once a month, the ICL Services team prepares and provides several reports to the client. With this reporting system, you can monitor the work of individual services and address malfunctions in time, as well as see the potential for improvement of services and evaluate the work of the performer's team.
Also, virtual machines were transferred from one physical server to another, as the previous infrastructure had become obsolete. ICL Services experts consulted with the client to optimize the performance of the virtual machines after the transition to the new server.
Efficiency and responsiveness of the first-line has been achieved — processing up to 60% of requests received by a dedicated number or through the company's internal service portal.
Products and technologies
- VMware
- ServiceNow
Results
- Request processing speed has doubled — critical requests are processed twice as fast and are always the highest priority.
- The client was able to use internal resources for more important tasks and business scaling.